QNAP TS-239 Pro II VMware Performance – NFS vs iSCSI

May 1, 2013

I recently purchased a QNAP TS-239 PRO II+ 2-bay NAS and wanted to establish a performance baseline for future troubleshooting. I was surprised to find that in almost every test NFS outperformed iSCSI. For details on the configuration and performance tests I conducted continue reading.

The Management and VM Network on (vSwitch0) are connected to the 192.168.1.x network using the onboard Broadcom BCM57766 network adapter (vmnic0). vmnic0 is connected to a Cisco 3560 Compact Switch (WS-C3560CG-8PC) and is not used for Storage traffic.

A VMkernel Port configured with the IP address (10.10.10.202) was created on a second vSwitch (vSwitch1). The Apple Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter BCM57762 (vmnic1) is directly connected to Ethernet Interface 2 (10.10.10.102) of the QNAP TS-239 PRO II+ with a BELKIN 1′ Cat6 Patch Cable.

There are several methods for testing storage performance, I decided to use the following:

I placed the VMware-io-analyzer-1.5.1 virtual machine on the NFS datastore (NFS01), and achieved the following results.

IOPS

MB/s

Max_Throughput.icf (Read)

222.45

111.2

Max_Write_Throughput

181.25

90.62

In the second test I enabled the Software iSCSI Initiator on the ESXi host and added the 1024 GB iSCSI LUN as a VMFS-5 datastore (QNAP-20130622203046). I placed the VMware-io-analyzer-1.5.1 virtual machine on the iSCSI datastore, and achieved the following results.

IOPS

MB/s

Max_Throughput.icf (Read)

186.12

93.06

Max_Write_Throughput

127.37

63.69

Virtual Machine – HD Tune Pro and Intel (NASPT) Results

A Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition -SP2 virtual machine was used for the HD Tune Pro 5.50 and Intel NAS Performance Toolkit (NASPT) tests. The virtual machine is configured with a single vCPU, 1024 MB of Memory, and a single vNIC connected to the VM Network Virtual Machine Port Group. The operating system is installed Samsung Electronics 840 Pro Series 2.5-Inch 256 GB SATA Solid State Drive (datastore1) using an 8 GB Thick Provision Eager Zeroed .vmdk file (Hard disk 1). An additional 80 GB Thick Provision Eager Zeroed .vmdk file (Hard disk 2) which was created on the NFS or iSCSI datastore for testing.

In the HD Tune Results NFS average read bandwidth (MB/s) is 42.32% better than iSCSI. NFS average write bandwidth (MB/s) is 61.09% better than iSCSI. The NASPT Results show that File Copy to NAS iSCSI is 27.59% faster than NFS and File Copy from NAS NFS is 36.84% faster than iSCSI.